What is AI marketing?

AI marketing uses artificial intelligence when completing, planning or executing marketing activities and goals. Additionally, AI in marketing can use artificial intelligence capabilities, such as data collection, data-driven analysis, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML), to gather customer and audience insights. 

Often, marketing artificial intelligence strategies look different from company to company, depending on your needs, goals, industry, employee skills and other factors. 

But AI in marketing is still a relatively new concept, so it’s understandable if you’re unsure where to start. This guide will help by outlining the pros and cons of AI marketing and providing three strategies you can start using today to add AI marketing to your business operations. 

The pros of AI marketing

There are some clear benefits to implementing AI marketing into your business operations, including:

• Efficiency. Artificial intelligence can automate many tasks, potentially allowing teams to automate smaller tasks and focus on areas that will significantly impact the business. 
• Cost-savings. As employees become more efficient, they can also get more work done in fewer hours, which saves owners time on labor. 
• Innovation. Artificial intelligence uses a vast database of information, which you can leverage to help you develop ideas. That means using AI in marketing could help you innovate and create new ideas you may not have thought of. 
• Remain competitive. As more companies adopt AI, it’s important to quickly take advantage of these new tools to keep up with your competition.

The cons of AI marketing 

Some of the potential downsides of using artificial intelligence in your marketing practices are:

• Privacy and ownership issues. AI tools typically learn by scouring and analyzing public information from the internet. As a result, there have been some issues around artificial intelligence privacy and ownership issues. When you create something using an AI tool, it’s essential to understand if:

• • You own the final product
  • You’re giving over the data and inputs you share for the AI tool to save and repurpose

• Lacking creativity. As everyone uses AI, it can mean some marketing ideas that your AI tool suggests may be unoriginal. After all, your competitors may have used the same tool and received a similar result. Ultimately, AI cannot be as unique and creative as a human-generated idea. 
• Biases and inaccuracies. Artificial intelligence is not a perfect system. AI cannot tell when information is inaccurate or biased, so it could produce a final outcome with these very issues. 

3 strategies for AI marketing 

If you’re interested and ready to implement AI marketing into your business operations, here are three strategies you can use today.

1. Use AI tools to write your copy

Every business needs to create marketing copy. You may need copy for:

• Emails
• Website landing pages
• Brochures and information guides
• Social media posts
• Blogs
• Video scripts 
• Advertisements (digital ads, radio ads, podcast ads, etc.)

Many businesses have a marketer or copywriter on staff (or on contract) who does all the marketing copy, but it can be expensive and time-consuming. This person can be much more efficient if they utilize AI in their copywriting tasks. 

However, there’s a nuance to it. Don’t think you can let AI do all the writing. The best tactic is to empower your copywriter to use AI as a tool that works alongside them.

A marketer or writer can turn to artificial intelligence for topic ideas, a general outline or a starting point for a piece. But from there, it’s essential that a human inspects, edits and reworks the piece to ensure it’s aligned with your business’ branding and messaging. 

Encourage your marketing team to start using AI tools, such as ChatGPT, in their writing to help them produce content at a faster rate. 

2. Use AI tools for video editing

If you’ve ever planned a marketing strategy in recent years, you know that the phrase “video is king” often comes up. Video is a fantastic way to engage with your customers and prospects.

Video is entertaining, meaning people are more likely to consume this content. A video on a website page can also make the user stay longer on the page, which could help improving your company’s SEO ranking. Emails and advertisements may also have higher conversion rates when they include video.

Of course, video only gets you great marketing results if it’s well-produced and edited. That is where AI marketing can help. 

There are AI video tools that can help with creating and editing videos for your business. These tools can cut down the time your team spends on video production and increase efficiency. 

Learning how to implement these tools as part of your overall marketing strategy can help diversify your campaigns and increase engagement and conversions.

3. Use AI tools to get customer and audience insights

Effective marketing is strategic and powered by data. You can’t just invest in marketing tactics based on a gut feeling and hope they work. If you want marketing that impacts your business, there needs to be insights that support your decisions. 

And thanks to AI, businesses now have access to insights about their customers and prospects, so they know precisely how to adjust their marketing efforts. 

Here are some examples of how AI tools are helping give insights into your audience.

• Advertisement analysis: Digital ads can be costly. AI-powered tools, like Levity, can predict an ad’s performance before it’s ever launched. This can allow businesses to improve ads without wasting marketing dollars.
• Social listening: A large part of marketing is maintaining a solid brand image for a company. Social listening tools have been around for a while. These platforms track and alert you anytime your company has been mentioned or tagged online. But with the integration of AI into these tools, you can now use artificial intelligence to understand the tone and intent of what’s being said, as well as get recommendations on how to respond, when to post and who to collaborate with. 
• Customer churn analysis: Many business owners understand that gaining a new customer is more expensive than retaining a current customer. This is why keeping an eye on customer churn is crucial. Luckily, artificial intelligence can now make churn predictions automated. AI tools consider factors about your customers, such as NPS scores, feedback, comments and engagement, to assign customers with a level of risk for churn. You can then target accounts that are high risk to focus on retaining them and keeping that revenue. 

Using marketing artificial intelligence the smart way

AI marketing tools cannot replace your marketing team. All artificial intelligence platforms work best when the final product is reviewed by a human. 

But these tools can be assets that help your marketing employees work better. The best approach is to reassure your team that AI is not replacing them. Additionally, don’t force them to use AI tools they’re not excited about. Instead, learn what tools they are interested in learning so the adoption of these AI platforms can benefit both the business and the employees. 

When used correctly, artificial intelligence can help a business save money, increase outputs and foster creativity. Remember that your competition is probably already exploring or using AI marketing platforms, so the time to start is now.